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Training: Enjoy interactive webinars on leadership skills, personal development, innovation, creating a business concept proposal, social enterpreneurship, and the UN SDGs. The sessions are interactive and experiential learning for your team challenges. Get the full details here.

Peer-Support Workshops: Share your issues, learning and insights with other team leaders from around the world in facilitated network sessions. Receive guidance from colleagues and professionals. 

Personal coaching: One-on-one coaching helps you form deep insights into yourself, align with your goals, amplify your strengths, and overcome the blockages that sabotage your best intentions. YOu can raise issues with your coach like fostering team engagement, dealing with conflict, stimulating creativity, or your own personal challenges around confidence, leadership, and making tough decisions. Book times for 50-minute online sessions that suit you with your chosen coach.You can book as many sessions as you like. We recommend getting weekly coaching.

Business mentoring: One-on-one business mentoring enables you to get help with technical challenges like business strategy, marketing, economic evaluation, and making the idea happen. Mentors use more coaching skills than advice giving, to help you develop a quality team proposal. Book times for 50-minute online sessions that suit you with your chosen mentor.You can book as many sessions as you like. 

Just-in-time email guidance: You will receive emails through the contest with guidance on the challenges as they are about to arise. 

Microsoft Teams GEE Leader Platform: You are sent a link to join the Microsoft Teams platform for GEE Team Leaders. Access the training, resources, powerpoints, and bookings through this link. We do not routinely provide videos of the workshops as participants can raise personal challenges in the sessions. We aim to video any lecture segments. We encouage you to ask questions, and respond to others questions and comments on the site.  

FAQs: Check out the FAQs where common issues are often raised. 

Programme Director support: If you are having issues that need additional support, contact the Programme Director, Dr Deb Gilbertson.

Strategies to Foster Engagement

There are often very good reasons for absence.  If you have five participants engaged you are doing well.

In past years we have had deaths in the family, other family crises, illness (including malaria and yellow fever), injury (including having to type one handed), debilitating depression and suicide attempts, war (Armenia), devastating earthquake (Nepal), campus riots (Bangladesh), very limited access to the internet especially in the weekend (Pacific Islands, and many parts of Africa), Rwandan genocide remembrance week that shuts down the country and university, expensive internet, slow internet, elections that lead to dropping internet speed to slow dial-up to prevent protesters engaging with each other (Iran), elections that lead to curfew and participants imprisoned for breaking curfew to talk to team mates (Nigeria), murder, robbery and assault in cheap late night internet café (Nigeria), girls who are accused of being prostitutes because they go out at night to an internet café (Pakistan), hospitalisation (there will be at least four this contest), medivac out of country, travel home in holidays to remote village without internet (Colombia and Africa), travel, exams, other pressures in life, electricity shedding for 14 hours per day (Nepal), electricity collapse across the country for nine days (Nauru), lost or stolen cellphone, damaged or corrupted computer, emails lost in junk mail folder, corrupted email account, and using the alternative instead of the main email address.  

There is not much you can do about these issues.  However, you can do something about people who are anxious to respond. 

Some cultures are flummoxed when the team gets into business before knowing each other. Others are shy of making a mistake. Their reflections describe how they waited for a week before engaging with the team because they were not sure what to say. Others are convinced that their ideas are not creative enough, so avoid saying anything. Some don’t clearly understand the instructions, in part because the instructions are vague or not easily understood by a person with English as a second language. There can also be a gender issue where women feel they need to be passive to not cause offence. And there can be an issue with team members avoiding making suggestions because they do not wish to seem like they are usurping the leader’s role. Some countries are much more hierarchical, so they expect the leader to be strident. Leaders from some countries see themselves as servants of the team, and feel being forthright makes them appear too bossy. Some reflections from participants in developing countries expect their ideas and education to be dismissed by people from developed countries.  

So, what are some strategies for fostering engagement, or dealing with missing members?

1. Get team members to know you and each other.
2. Write to them individually - perhaps drawing on the qualities and potential they displayed in the bio
3. Send a text (numbers are on the end of the spreadsheet).
4. Contact their academic or recommender (email at end of spreadsheet). I suggest you copy them into your email to the academic. E.g. “I am concerned that we have not heard from xyz who is in my GEE team. Please can you encourage them to contribute, or we will not be able to continue to include them in the team. Or if you know of a good reason for their absence like illness can you let me know please?”
5. Role model what you want.
6. If the team cannot produce the quality of creative ideas that gets everybody excited, then you need to add some. Include ideas that resonate with their world view, or may be located in their country. Have a look at a sample email to foster creativity that is in the Team Leaders Resource folder.
7. Be very specific about action steps. E.g. "Hey guys let's contribute ideas" is hopeless. Make it specific, make it small steps to respond to at first, and make it obvious how to respond. Perhaps ask for issues first, or something from their experience.
8. Recognise contributions, including providing specific feedback on the behaviour e.g. "Thank you for your fascinating insights on issues in your country", or "Thank you for stepping up to be the first to share an idea", or "I appreciate your thoughtfulness in taking others' ideas and stretching them", or "What a creative brain! It is so good having you on our team pushing us out of our comfort zone", or "I know what a challenge it is for you to get to a good internet connection - thank you for your commitment in finding a way to contribute to the team effort."
9. Paint the picture, put people in it, and make them heroes in their own story. E.g. “Thanks Daniel for the great description of the issues for widowed women in Rwanda. It seems there may be an option for us to have a project to help create a series of women’s coops across Rwanda that gives these women the power, support and resources they need to survive. Daniel, can you use your deep knowledge of the issue, and networks to see what would be beneficial?”
10. Write requests out to everyone, making them look like potential achievers in the eyes of their colleagues. People usually step up to the perception. So if you are saying things like, "C'mon guys.  We are falling behind.  We must get at least something to work on for the team project", then you are projecting a perception of laziness and failure.  People like to be part of a success story, not a failing story. 
11. Keep trying. And then keep trying. Leadership is primarily about trying and caring.
12. Provide some face saving way if they are failing to deliver. E.g. "perhaps my emails are getting caught in your spam folder."
13. Ask for help from the slightly more active members. E.g. "You have been a stalwart member of this team. Please, I need your help, again.  Can you post xyz to help break the drought."
14. Threaten with exclusion from the team (but not yet!). You will need to make sure that you have done everything that you can do first. I would tend to put it, “Please do not put me in a position of leaving your name off the report, as you would no longer be eligible for prize money, awards, the certificate or letter of commendation.  However in fairness to the rest of the team, you will need to contribute to the team effort, to have your name included.  I will need to make a decision on your inclusion over the next few days.”
15. Get tough. E.g. “If I have not received at least one useful idea from you before May 5 and meaningful contribution to the team effort then your name will not be on the team report”.
16. Get decisive. E.g. “In fairness to the team we are not able to include your name on the team report”.

Click this link for the GEE Team Leader workshop schedule or read below:

Follow this link for guidance, or read below:

Follow this link or some common issues with accessing the Microsoft Teams platform or read below.

Click on this link to progress to the next screen if you get a fairly blank page with the heading "Apps" on it or read below:

Your coaches have been training hard to develop their coaching skills to support you. Some are professional coaches working in industry, others are managers in business, and some are former winners in previous years of the GEE.

You can think of your coach as a "thinking partner" - someone who will help you discover the leader in you, how to overcome your most wicked leadership challenges and have maximum impact in your team. Your sessions are confidential and focused entirely on you. The coach brings clarity to how you will tackle issues. They amplify your thinking. Your coaches help you uncover your own strengths and grow your capabilities.

They are a trusted confidant - someone who is totally committed to your issues and your journey. They'll hear you and lift you up when you need it the most. They won't always tell you what to do, but they will challenge you and allow you to see things in a new way. There is a reason that most Fortune 500 executives now have coaches ... and now you can find out why. 

You choose the topic you want to address – perhaps engage your team more, deal with a difficult member, grow your confidence, inspire your colleagues, tap your creativity, address procrastination, avoidance and anxiety, build a team culture, be your authentic self, motivate yourself toward your goals rather than away from stresses, cope with stress, uncertainty and time pressure, set goals, or any other topic you wish to reflect on.

GEE Team Leader reflections often say they wished they had booked a coach earlier. We recommend at least one leadership coaching session each week. Book a coach, and see how it goes ..... 

Log onto the Microsoft Teams Global Enterprise Experience site. If you have several Microsoft Teams accounts, make sure it says "Global Enterprise Experience in the top right corner where your image or initials are in the roundel

 Under "Your Teams" click on "Leadership Coaches"

Explore bios of the coaches under "Posts" to check out who you would like to work with.

Under the "Bookings" tab choose the Service, preferred coach (optional) and pick a time that suits you. Times will be shown in your computer's time zone.

Business Mentors are trained to help you with the technical issues of your business proposal such as:

• Creativity
• Economic evaluation
• Marketing
• Financing
• Business Strategy
• Intellectual propoerty protection
• Writing a great proposal

Log onto the Microsoft Teams Global Enterprise Experience site. If you have several Microsoft Teams accounts, make sure it says "Global Enterprise Experience in the top right corner where your image or initials are in the roundel

 Under "Your Teams" click on "Business Mentors"

Explore bios of the Business Mentors under "Posts" to check out who you would like to work with.

Under the "Bookings" tab select your mentor under "Staff" (optional) and pick a time that suits you. Times will be shown in your computer's time zone.